Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This is a novel that contrasts the acceptance, and delight, in the world as it is with the consequences of the desire to read in meanings to everything that we see about us.

In Eco's earlier book,The Name of the Rose, the detective mystery was parodied and this is taken one step further in this novel. The Detective mystery assumes that there is a mystery that can be solved. It invites investigation. In this novel the constant working deeper into mysteries produces only more obscurity ("the penis is just a phallic symbol"(view spoiler)[ or as has been said in Britain Brexit means Brexit (hide spoiler)]) which is undercut, or rather has the cork removed, by the surface of events. The childhood memories of one character, the love and impending fatherhood of another. The desire to find out why Professor Plum is dead in the library with a lead pipe next to him is shown to be a self-destructive one that can only end in a never ending kaleidoscope of ambiguity.

Eco's next step, naturally enough, in Baudolino is to show extraordinarily commonplace and political origins for some of the myths and legends that so obsess the legion of diabolicals in this novel.

At the centre of the story are an unlikely trio; Belbo, Causabon and Diotallevi. They work for a curious publisher, Garamond. The curiosity lies partly in the everyday with the one armed warehouseman who deals with all the deliveries and dispatches and partly in the esoteric transmutation of ordinary mortals into authors. The publishing house has two parts. One a respectable business the other a theatrical lure to entice and catch self-financing authors. It is a vanity press and a very profitable business the production of authors turns out to be.

Spotting a gap in the market they become involved in producing a series of books on magic, mysticism and hermetic 'learning' to feed the credulity of the reading public. The publishing house here is not a beacon of enlightenment but rather a smoky fire that seeks to deepen a smog of obscurantism over readers. As we read we are drawn through a world of varied, contradictory but passionately held beliefs. As the publishing house offers the untalented the opportunity to become authors. So too the cults and sects the trio deal with offer meaning and a grand significance to people's lives.

In short both sides of the operation, the publishing and the cults, are a con. The kind of con in which you get exactly what you wanted, but it simply costs more than you expected.

This allows Eco to give a good kicking in passing to Holy Blood Holy Grail but also shows how bizarre beliefs in the hollow earth, the Druidical training of the Aryan Jesus and the fantasies of the Alchemists in a divinely meaningful universe spill over to affect our cultural and political lives. Perhaps is a novelist's response to Religion and the Decline of Magic.

The heroes attempt to out do the irrational beliefs of a world of faith, clinging only to the involvement of the Templars with everything, is sure to end badly when their inventiveness is taken terribly, terribly seriously.

Remember, The Templars have something to do with everything.

At the same time this is also a book about the stories that we create and recreate about ourselves while growing up and how one can become trapped within them and as it turns out, few things are as fatal as being trapped within a story of one's own construction.



(An earlier version of this review was eaten by the Templar internet.)